Accessibility in Web Development: Why It Matters More Than Ever | Digital Marmalade [Skip to main content](#main-content) ![](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/pagebuilder/949/download/content_id) For a long time, web accessibility was treated as a nice-to-have — something you'd address if time and budget allowed, after everything else was done. That position has become harder to hold. The European Accessibility Act is now in force for digital products and services, bringing legal requirements that apply to a wide range of websites and apps. More practically, the argument that accessibility is a specialist concern for a minority of users has always been wrong. Building accessibly makes digital products better for everyone. Digital Marmalade builds accessibility into projects from the start rather than treating it as a retrofit. Our work with the NHS and King's College London on [MyHealthE](../../case-studies/nhs-king-s-college-london/a-simple-way-to-track-progress-during-treatment-with-child-and-adolescent-mental-health-services) — a platform used by parents and carers of children in mental health treatment — is a good example of why this matters. The people using that platform include carers of all ages and technical abilities, often in stressful moments. Accessibility isn't a feature in that context. It's the baseline. What web accessibility actually means ------------------------------------- Accessibility in web development means building products that work for people regardless of disability, device, or circumstance. That covers a wide range: screen reader users who are blind or have low vision, people who navigate by keyboard rather than mouse, users with cognitive differences who need clear language and predictable layouts, and people using a phone in bright sunlight or with one hand. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — WCAG — provide a shared standard for measuring this, with three levels of conformance: A, AA and AAA. Most legal requirements and best practice guidance point to AA as the target. Why retrofitting accessibility is expensive ------------------------------------------- The most common approach — building a product and then checking it for accessibility issues at the end — is also the most costly. Problems that take an hour to fix during design can take days to fix in a live codebase. A button that's never been given a proper label, a colour contrast ratio that's slightly off, a form that doesn't work with a screen reader: none of these are difficult to get right from the start. They're all time-consuming to unpick after the fact, and some require significant structural changes to fix properly. Building with accessibility from day one also tends to produce better products in ways that go beyond compliance. Clear heading structures help search engines as well as screen readers. Good colour contrast helps users in poor lighting as well as those with visual impairments. Logical keyboard navigation helps power users as well as those who can't use a mouse. These aren't trade-offs. They're improvements that happen to serve accessibility requirements as well. What the European Accessibility Act means in practice ----------------------------------------------------- The European Accessibility Act requires that a wide range of digital products and services meet accessibility standards. For UK-based agencies and their clients operating in European markets, this is now a live compliance consideration rather than a future one. Even outside the EU, the direction of travel is clear — accessibility regulation is increasing, not decreasing, and the cost of building to standard from the outset is always lower than the cost of compliance-driven remediation later. How we approach this -------------------- On every project we work on at Digital Marmalade, accessibility requirements are set at the brief stage, not the testing stage. That means design decisions — colour palette, typography, component patterns, interaction design — are made with WCAG compliance in mind from the start. It also means testing with assistive technologies is part of the QA process, not an afterthought. If you're starting a new digital product or reviewing an existing one for accessibility, [our team](../../contact) is happy to talk through what's involved. [ Back to news ](/news) September 2026 ### [ How a Digital Brand Stays Itself Since 2001 ](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/news/how-a-digital-brand-stays-itself-since-2001) Read more September 2026 ### [ Designing Digital Products for Children: What Changes ](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/news/designing-digital-products-for-children-what-changes) Read more September 2026 ### [ What Makes Interactive Digital Learning Actually Work? ](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/news/what-makes-interactive-digital-learning-actually-work) Read more Allow cookies